A Study Of Hedges In 2020 American Presidential Debates From The Perspective Of Contextual Adaptation

In daily communication,hedges are often used by people to achieve specific communicative intention.Scholars usually use evaluation theory,politeness principle,ecological linguistics and some other theories to study hedges.Most of the corpus used in these studies is mainly focused on the press conference,news,diplomacy and other discourse.The author finds that there are a few scholars using linguistic adaptation theory to study hedges in the presidential debates.Therefore,this paper studies the hedges in the 2020 presidential debates from the perspective of contextual adaptation.This paper uses the method of quantitative and qualitative research to solve the following three questions:(1)What are the distribution,frequency,similarities and differences of hedges used by American presidential candidates?(2)How can the American presidential candidates adapt to the mental world,social world and physical world by using hedges?(3)What pragmatic functions do the American presidential candidates adapt to by using hedges?For the research procedures,firstly,the author classifies the hedges in corpus according to the classification method of the authoritative scholar Prince.Then,the author uses AntConc3.5.7 software to make a quantitative study,finding out the distribution,frequency,similarities and differences of hedges used by the two presidential candidates.Finally,the author uses the framework of contextual adaptation theory to make a qualitative study of hedges used by the presidential candidates,including the adaptation to mental world,social world,physical world and pragmatic functions.Through detailed analysis,the author concludes that:(1)The two presidential candidates both use rounders,plausible shields and adaptors for many times,but seldom use attribute shields.Besides,Biden won the American election,to a large extent,benefited from the success of the presidential debates.The success of the presidential debates is also due to the reasonable use of hedges,using rounders and should for many times.(2)The two presidential candidates used hedges that were both adapting to their and audience’s mental world,social world and physical world.(3)The two presidential candidates adapted to the following pragmatic functions by using hedges:psychology of self-protecting,motivation of enhancing persuasion,purpose of constructing a positive image,audience’s expectations,expression objective,expression accurate,social culture,communication norms,occupation,power,time and space.This paper studies the contextual adaptation of hedges in the 2020 American presidential debates.On the one hand,this study helps people understand the distribution,frequency,similarities,differences,contextual adaptation and pragmatic functions of the two presidential candidates by using hedges in the presidential debates.On the other hand,this study helps people to use hedges in the future communication to achieve specific communicative intention,especially to provide a new debating skill for debaters and a good response strategy for national leaders,spokesmen of the ministry of foreign affairs,press speakers and other public figures when answering sensitive and controversial questions.